Only Really Good Chocolate Please

My purchases for the last several years have been a perfect indication of what is NOT going to happen.

I started with the very large Costco bag of classic chocolate treats which I planned to pair with a bowl of glow in the dark spiders, snakes and skeletons for the non-chocolate crowd. It was a big bag (’cause Costco) but I had a moment of doubt. And so I bought a second very large bag of non-chocolate based treats, telling myself it was best for kids with allergies to have other options that were treats and what if we have as many as we had two years ago and I don’t want to run out and… blah, blah, blah.

So I bought the extra bag. We now have half a bag of each left (maybe a little more of the chocolate than the others) and we only have that little because I totally loaded the last several ghouls and goblins down with handfuls (as the rest of the neighborhood did by looking at my kids’ haul). In years past this would have been a problem. In the past I’ve always seen Halloween as the beginning of the slow slide into non-stop eating for me, starting just one Twix and KitKat at a time.

I did eat some candy last night. Little mini versions of two my former favorites and a newcomer (that my daughter gave me). I ate a Twix, still good but not amazing. I ate a 100,000 bar (less good but good), and a Hershey’s dark chocolate over caramel thing (better by far, but definitely not amazing). I discovered that there is really no danger in my having this leftover candy. There really is no danger because I’ve changed.

Over the last couple of years I’ve become a curator of what I eat. I’ve paid really close attention to what feels good in my body, what feels good in my brain, and what is worth any not good feeling that it might bring. I’ve discovered that eating lots of sweets doesn’t make me feel good. I knew this and it was a long-term step down for me (a journey my sister and I took together and explain how to accomplish here), but I hadn’t gotten over Halloween candy yet. My attention wasn’t as keenly focused. I hadn’t realized that when I eat it, it makes me hungry. It creates its own cravings and if I listen to those cravings and eat enough of it, I feel jittery and don’t sleep as well. I hadn’t realized that it is so much easier to maintain a weight that feels good to me when I don’t eat much in the way of sweets. I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t even enjoying it in the kind of orgasmic way my kids seem to. But now I’ve noticed all of these things and I just don’t want it the way I used to.

We’ll figure out something to do with this candy (maybe even save the non-chocolate bits for next year because goodness knows that crap never goes bad), but there’s no emergency here. I’ll get rid of it because I don’t feel like figuring out where to store it. I’ll get rid of it because it’s taking up space that we could use for something else. Now that I’m paying attention, I’d rather have nothing than a bag of Crunch bars. I’d certainly rather have one piece of really high quality dark chocolate with sea salt and caramel than a bag of Crunch bars.

And now that I’m think about it, this lesson seems to be playing out across the board for me. I’m paying more attention to what feels right in my life and it makes it so much easier to get rid of the things that just don’t fit anymore: the clothes, the stuff, the books, the obligations, the people pleasing… wait, what? Yes, I group them all together – the physical and the emotional – because the beginning is the same in all of those cases: being willing to pay close attention to what I am doing and whether or not it is serving me.

That awareness makes changing habits and decluttering a matter of shedding skin rather than imposing discipline. That awareness allows those changes to be an act of self-discovery rather than a vow to crack down or get serious. That awareness is an act of self-love, and if you are anything like I used to be, you could really use some more of that.

What are you eating? What are you wearing? What’s around your house and on your calendar? Why are you choosing these things? Are you paying attention? Is it serving you? Is it as good as really great chocolate or is it a Crunch bar (yes, they’re my least favorite)? What would paying really close attention change in you?

If you’d like some help in learning to pay this kind of attention so you can shed some old skin, old habits, old parts of yourself, sign up for a Discovery Call. Let’s see if we can’t get that change started for you.